


all i need is to see your face

by hudders-and-hiddles (LeslieWrites)



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Episode: s07e02 New York New York, F/F, Friendship, Late Night Conversations, POV Alexis Rose, Post-Canon, Pre-Slash, Self-Doubt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-18 16:21:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29246490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeslieWrites/pseuds/hudders-and-hiddles
Summary: Alexis has doubts. Twyla knows how to soothe them.
Relationships: Alexis Rose/Twyla Sands
Comments: 34
Kudos: 52
Collections: Schitt's Creek Season 7





	all i need is to see your face

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [SCSeason7](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/SCSeason7) collection. 



> _Prompt: 7x02 - New York, New York: After settling into her new apartment, Alexis has jitters about her first day at her new job next week. She reaches out to Twyla who has served as her sounding board all these years. Sensing her friend could use a pick me up, Twyla books the first non-Larry Air flight she can to see Alexis and lift her spirits before her big day._ I technically only ran with the first two sentences of that prompt (sorry!), but hopefully it gets the job done anyway.
> 
> You can probably read this as a gen friendship fic if you want, but I consider it to be pre-slash, in those early post-canon days when they're still working out the precise shape of what they mean to each other. Title is from ["breathin" by Ariana Grande.](https://youtu.be/kN0iD0pI3o0)
> 
> Thanks of course to my beta, [Claire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cromarty/pseuds/cromarty), for always soothing my own doubts.

It’s late enough that Alexis knows she shouldn’t call, but she can’t stop herself from tapping the button on the screen anyway, running her fingers through her hair as she waits for the call to connect.

It rings, and it rings some more, and she hates that she has to watch the disappointment settle across her own face. _It was a stupid idea anyway._

But just as she reaches a finger over to end the call, Twyla’s face appears on her screen, bleary-eyed, with the pink edge of a pillow crease across her cheek. Alexis’s heart beats faster even as she rushes out an apology. “Oh my god, Twy, were you sleeping? I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have—”

“No, no, it’s fine,” she replies, her voice hoarse and slow with sleep as she blinks in the amber light of her bedside lamp. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Totally. Mhmm,” Alexis says with what she hopes is a reassuring smile and a too-casual flap of a hand. “I, um, I shouldn’t have bothered you. I’m fine. I’ll let you get back to bed.”

“Alexis.”

The sound of her name in Twyla’s mouth has always set her stomach fluttering, but tonight, when her stomach’s already beating its wings against its cage, it feels instead like slipping into a warm bath, all your muscles starting to relax as soon as you submerge yourself in the comfort of it. It’s precisely what Alexis needs tonight, and she takes what might be her first deep breath in hours.

“Wanna tell me about it?” Twyla asks as she cuddles back down deeper into her bed. She props her phone on the other pillow beside her, and Alexis mirrors her as best she can when half her wardrobe is piled on the other side of her mattress. 

Her instinct is still to say no, to let Twyla get back to sleep and deal with this on her own. Stretched out beside each other though, it feels a little like a sleepover, and it makes it easier to say the things that have been racing around inside her head all evening. “What if I’m not good at this?”

“You’re going to be,” Twyla insists, and Alexis shakes her head. 

“You don’t know that.”

“Sure I do. And Interflix does, too. That’s why they hired you.”

“Okay, yeah, maybe they thought what I did _before_ was good,” she allows, “but that was just, like, wrangling Mom. And Dad’s been making David and I do that since we were kids; it’s not like it was hard.” She reaches up to tug at her earlobe as her anxiety starts to rise up again. She can’t recall the last time she was this nervous about something. “But it’s not like I can just walk next door and take the phone out of Pauline Chalamet’s hands when the sleeping pills kick in and she starts tweeting that Tom Hanks has signed on to play a half-magpie hybrid who woos Clara Mandrake with his collection of shiny objects in The Crows Have Eyes 6, coming your way in 2027!”

“Oh yeah.” Laughter sparkles in Twyla’s eyes at the memory. “Wasn’t that the night your mom also tweeted that Cate Blanchett is the only actress with enough sexual charisma to be able to play her when someone finally makes a biopic about her life?”

“Ew, Twy, I did _not_ need that reminder.” 

Alexis closes her eyes tight enough to make her nose scrunch up as she tries to shake the whole incident from her mind. Between all that and the livestream about David’s oopsie-daisy, it had been the messiest day of her fledgling publicist career, even without the added trauma of having to hear _way_ too many of her mother’s opinions on Cate’s breasts. But she’d handled it. She’d handled it because she had to, because it was her family, because no one else could. She’s had a whole lifetime of practice taking care of Rose family drama, including plenty of her own making, but the problem is that this isn’t family. It’s her job, and she’s going to be working with strangers, people whose meltdowns she’s not going to automatically know the best way to deal with, people whose trust she has to earn, people who are going to expect her to know what she’s doing from the moment she walks in the door. It’s a lot of pressure for someone whose work resumé consists solely of Creative Director at AR Glam Polish and Senior Executive Assistant and Community Liaison at the Schitt’s Creek Veterinary Clinic. Aside from Ted and the dozens of fans of her reality show, no one was really expecting much from her in either of those roles. Honestly, she hadn’t expected much of herself either.

“What if it’s too hard, Twy? What if I came all this way, and I can’t do it?”

Twyla is looking at her like she wants to reach through the screen and give her a hug. Alexis really wishes that she could. 

“Do you remember when you were dating Mutt?” 

She wrinkles her nose at the non sequitur, then wrinkles it harder at the thought of her relationship with Mutt. She’s apologized about that whole not-really-but-also-kinda-actually stealing her boyfriend thing, and she didn’t think Twyla was really the sort to hold grudges. 

But that’s apparently not where this is going, because Twlya says, “There was a day you two were outside the Cafe after the lunch rush, and he was trying to teach you how to ride a bike.” Alexis remembers. Twyla had come out, concerned at first, but then she’d given Alexis a tip that had clicked in a way none of Mutt’s attempts to teach her had, and she’d managed to shakily pedal herself all the way back to the motel. “You couldn’t do it at first, but then… you learned.”

“That’s easy though,” Alexis insists. “Even, like, little kids know how to do that.”

“It’s not easy. It might seem like it because other people can do it, but they had to learn, just like you did.” She shrugs, her bare shoulder scrunching up into the frame and back out again. “You’ll learn how to do this, too. You can do anything you put your mind to.”

Twyla’s faith in her is reassuring. Alexis knows that she actually means what she says and that if she didn’t think it was true, she wouldn’t say it. It’s nice having someone who believes in her that much, even when she isn’t sure she believes in herself.

But there’s still something niggling at her. Something pushing at that tender, bruised spot behind her ribs, still aching from _you can’t move back here_ and _can’t say that we didn’t try_ , from _we’ll be heading to California_ and _Patrick found us a house_. 

“This matters, Twy,” she says, closing her eyes to make it easier to let the words go. “I gave up a lot to be here. Ted. My family. Schitt’s Creek...” 

_You._

But the crux of it all is that Alexis has spent her life taking what was offered and talking people into offering things that weren’t supposed to be up for the taking, but there’s never been anything she’s wanted the way she wants this. And she doesn’t just want it; she wants to work for it. 

That feeling is new and it’s big and it’s absolutely fucking terrifying.

“I want this so much,” she admits in a whisper. “And I don’t know what to do with that.”

It’s a confession she’d never trust to anyone else’s hands, but Twyla catches it and holds it close and safe, the way she always has. “Letting things be important to you can be hard,” she says. “But caring about something. Or someone.” Alexis opens her eyes to find Twyla’s beautiful jade eyes looking right back. “It’s easy, too. If you want it that badly, you’ll figure it out.”

Alexis fights the urge to roll her eyes because there’s no way it can be that simple. But then she thinks about her brother and all his little diagrams and lists and sketches, his dreams of a _pristine retail experience_ inked across the pages of his journal. She thinks about her mom furiously annotating the pages of the script the studio had sent through just days before her flight to Bosnia. She thinks about Dad and Stevie and even Roland cleaning gutters and scrubbing windows, making the motel better bit by tiny, dirty bit. 

Maybe it is easy after all.

“Thanks, Twy. How do you always know just what to say?”

Someone else would laugh, shrug it off, maybe joke that it’s a gift. But the corner of Twyla’s mouth twists toward a smile. “I know you, Alexis.”

And what can she possibly say in response to that? There aren’t any words adequate enough to capture the way her lungs stutter in her chest and her heart drags itself up into her throat. Instead, she does the same thing she always does when her love for the people around her gets to be too big for her to express; she reaches out a finger and taps it against the image of Twy’s perfect, freckled nose. 


End file.
